An odd place in sexual identity-space

Author: SelkieTG

I wanted to review a really hot book I read very recently, on Amazon, only to find I couldn’t, for a complex set of reasons. It’s bad news I think, for authors of erotica, although not disastrous.

The reasons I have had to stop reviewing books on Amazon is due to somewhat unusual circumstances. It won’t surprise anyone to know that “Selkie” is a pseudonym, or (for those who know me) that I’ve largely made the problem myself.

The root of the issue is that back when I started using Amazon (a lo-o-ong time ago), I didn’t partition my erotic purchases (which I consider private and personal) from my other purchases. By the time I created my Selkie Amazon account, I’d already bought something like 700 erotic ebooks. And since they’ve been purchased over many years, and my memory is imperfect, it would be easy to accidentally buy a book a second time, wasting money. So Amazon’s “Whoops, you’ve already bought that book” message has saved me on many occasions.

The trouble is, because some authors have been buying fake positive reviews for their books, Amazon have to work vigorously to try to weed out and discourage such deceptive practices. A recent change was to require reviewers to have purchased enough items from their Amazon account, to indicate they’re not just a “burner account” set up to enable fake reviewing. But because of the size of my erotic library on Kindle under my other account, I didn’t want to start buying books on my Selkie account. This means, though, that I’m now unable to write reviews on Amazon under my Selkie identity.

I had hoped that perhaps using the Amazon Household feature would be a way around that — perhaps allowing me to:

transfer the books I’d bought, to that account (nope: for good reasons, which I understand)

be given a warning that the Household had already bought the item (nope; but Amazon did at least take a suggestion to consider adding the feature)

If Amazon add that feature, then I could create a Household, and share all the erotica from my main account to my Selkie account, and be warned if I accidentally try to purchase a book a second time. It took an hour and a half of text chat with a very helpful and thorough Amazon representative (Hi, Eunice!), as we explored options, to discover there was no way I could review ebooks while meeting both Amazon’s and my own requirements.

So until I buy enough goods under this account, and risk buying multiple copies of older books by accident, I can’t review erotic books I’ve bought under my main account on Amazon. I could review them under my real name, but then my reviews are shown with that name along with the other reviews for that product, so I can’t achieve the privacy I want.

I do keep a list of all the books I’ve bought. But to check that list to avoid double purchases requires me to remember to do the check, and spend the necessary 30 seconds — in contrast to the near zero-effort of just clicking the Amazon “Buy” button. So I know it would occasionally fail, and that irks me enough that I don’t want to do it.

But at least I can still review on Goodreads, so I’m doing that! For example, here is the review that prompted this blog post: The Gender Experiment. If you share my kinky likes, you’ll be in for a substantial feast.

Yeah, I suffer from breast envy. I began imagining what it would be like to have breasts around the time puberty kicked in. And as part of that, to help my imagining along, I happened to have a smooth rubber tennis ball. I discovered that by carefully halving it, with a touch of baby oil I could make it suck onto my chest, to give me two small bumps to fantasise with.

Jump forward many years, as I stumble over news of a suction device that women could use to enlarge their breasts. Covered in a TV (hah!) news report, the multi-thousand device was connected to an electronically controlled pump, and had a harness for holding it in place. In fact I think it was the Brava system. They said “We know that stretching causes new cells to form. So we reason that if we could maintain a pressure over a long period of time we could cause the breast tissue to increase; and indeed that’s true.”

That seemed to make sense to me. But I couldn’t afford it. (Here’s a good overview article of a few systems.)

Before I ramble on through my experiences and what I learned, I may as well give you the executive summary of my tips for breast enlargement via suction devices…

Executive Summary

Yes, it does work and cause breast growth.

But at least for me (with my XY genetics), the growth has been slow. Using them a lot, over a ten or more year period, I’m now a large B cup. (For a few hours after removing the suction domes, I’m a C.) I now fit nicely into my 34B bras and 36C bras.

You need to lubricate your skin so the suction draws your flesh painlessly into the cups without harmful stretching. I use Vitamin E cream; you could use sorbolene (but that might be a bit thin), or even vaseline (which might be too thick). Baby oil is too thin – after a few hours it absorbs into the skin; that means if you have to re-pump it’ll stretch your skin. Vit E is also a good moisturiser for keeping your skin healthy, anyway.

If you pump too hard, you can cause blisters. Perfectly normal blisters. Or, you can cause small blood vessels to break and cause spots or even bruising. People advise you not to pump so hard your breasts turn red/purple. And be guided by what your body tells you: if it’s hurting, you’re doing it wrong or too fiercely.

If you pump way too hard, it may press so firmly on your… tendon? Muscle? Ligament? (Maybe it’s the Teres Major muscle?) Anyway, it may press so hard against that you can’t easily move your arms. That means you’re pumping way, way too hard!

Rate of breast growth? Maybe a few millilitres of new growth per 6-8 hours of use. Of course I could be doing it wrong: check out other forums and see what others say. Keep in mind: healthy human tissue can only grow so fast.

The process tends to enlarge your nipples a little, too, and maybe make them more sensitive. On one forum, many women were saying they had to tape their nipples down beforehand to control this. Mine have changed only a little, but maybe that’s because nowadays they tend to get sucked up so they press against the domes.

It’s a gradual process. Don’t expect long term results in weeks. (If you’re lucky, like me, and pump just the right amount and can sleep on your side, you’ll be able to sleep with them on.)

I’m sure the suction draws a lot of fluid into the breasts. My gut feeling is that new tissue forms in the ‘empty spaces’ this makes within the existing tissue. The fluid slowly drains away. So, straight after the breasts will be enlarged, and gradually shrink back to almost the starting size as the fluid is reabsorbed. (That takes a few or several hours.)

Depending on how hard you pump and how long you leave the domes attached, the more they’ll leave a red pressure mark when you’ve removed them. I massage in some Vit E cream into the reddened flesh. It fades gradually over about an hour, for me. (And often some antiseptic cream: my skin is insanely sensitive.)

I find the feeling and sight of my breasts growing right before my eyes pleasurable and maybe even mildly addicting.

Wash your domes regularly with warm soap and water.

If you develop irritation or spots, try some mild antiseptic ointments. (Here in Australia, I use Savlon and it works really well.)

I also pair this with low dose phytoestrogens (only Remifemin) and HRT. I noticed nothing much in the way of breasts growth which I’d tried off and on over many years, until I started using the suction. That seemed to work, and I thought, “why not add some hormones, to ‘instruct’ the body on what it should be doing?”

That’s the end of the executive summary. The story of my own trial and error experiences now follow. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I do claim over ten years of experience doing this!

Experiments and experiences

As the years passed following puberty, I became more and more keen to try to grow my own breasts. I’m shy and private and don’t really understand why I’m doing it, or why I feel that way. But years later, with some genuine success, I’m much happier with my body, so I still think I’m heading in the right direction for me. I’ve tried lots of different methods (phytoestrogens, female hormones, self-hypnosis, …). The hormones worked, but were hard to get. The rest… not so much.

It was both a success and a failure. Using it for the first time was almost mind-bending: seeing my tiny breasts enlarge into astonishing prominence, while feeling the weirdly-pleasurable tugging expansion as they swelled up, was amazing! But I quickly realised I needed some kind of oil so the soft plastic rims would slide easily over my skin as my flesh was drawn up into the cups. (Otherwise, it pulls painfully and I think could stretch/damage your skin.)

Major problem: the plastic cracked very quickly. I patched them with silicone rubber, but more and more started appearing. And having both domes connected forced equal pressure. Nor were they all that comfortable.

The next system I bought came with a range of three increasingly large pairs of cups, and were shaped like this:

My 2nd domes

These were much better. It was pleasing to find the smallest were too small for me, and after some months, to discover I needed to change from the medium to the large size domes. But although you’ll notice the edges are rounded, they’re still hard plastic. That presses very painfully against your ribs, and the pain steadily increases the longer you wear them. This plastic also started to crack as it got older, especially if I pumped too hard. Again, silicone rubber sealant was the solution. I used a lot of silicone rubber to make and shape flanges that were far more comfortable.

Here’s my effort to show you the heavily modified domes. Oh: that top nozzle can crack and even break, too. So I slathered silicone around the tops, too, once I’d moved permanently to the biggest size. In the end, they looked reminiscent of a translucent Dalek, I thought!

But in due course more cracks developed, and with that amount of silicone they were quite bulky and heavy. (If you peer closely at the end of the hand pump, you’ll see it also failed, too, and I had to construct a cobble to seal that, too.)

So I did some more googling and found the Noogleberry, which is more expensive but has extensive forums and lots of pictures posted showing good amounts of success, so I decided to try them, too. As this TG Forum article notes, the Medium rings are a MUST.

My 3rd domes: the Noogleberry (large)

Noogleberry say:

“Noogleberry soft cup rings are made from high quality medical grade foam and are used optionally with the breast cups to improve the comfort and fit of the breast cups. Due to the nature of the cup rings, there may be some slight leakage of vaccum[sic] from the cups when they are pumped up so users may have to occasionally repump slightly.

“The soft cup rings simply fit onto the bottom of the breast cups and can easily be removed for washing in hot soapy water.”

My Noogleberry problems. The plastic of these domes is thicker and certainly far more durable. But – maybe I pump too hard – but the medical grade foam cup rings had a real tendency to slip off (the plastic would slide over it and then press directly into my flesh). Over the weeks the foam compressed and the rings flattened so they needed replacing. Worse though, to my mind, was the profile of the domes: if you look closely at the photo, you’ll see the bases are effectively flat. My rib cage isn’t flat: it curves.

I tried my silicone rubber trick to make permanent rings that cushioned better, but it’s really hard to just guess the curvature, so constructing my own rings that would actually make a seal and not let air ‘fart up into’ the cups was just too hard. (Well, that’s what it sounds like when it happens!)

So, back to googling. In the end I found something very like this on ebay:

My 4th domes: about A$30

The good things about these were the price, the curved profile of the base, the stiffer silicone/rubber ring. They worked well, but again the rings tended to slide off, and after many months, I cracked each. I patched the cracks with silicone and I also used a thin layer of silicone to basically cement the rings in place. I found a few different suppliers that all looked the same: most of these seemed to be surprisingly durable plastic. (Maybe my first ones were mildly faulty?)

Something like this is what I still use today, though I shifted to what is I think a 16cm height pair of domes, and the extended, maybe-too-strong pumping has left creases in my flesh:

One of my ‘creases’.

I sometimes use “blister pads” as extra cushioning, but I’ve also used a heat gun to carefully soften and bend out that section of the rim. (I wore thick rubber gloves and used the back of a metal dessert spoon to gently bend it out, with the soft rubbery ring moved out of the way.)

Here are my two “modded” domes; they’re about two years old now, and I’ve worn them for probably over a thousand hours:

On the bottom one, you can see I’ve had to completely coat the area around the base with extra (yes, you guessed it!) silicone rubber – I couldn’t work out where one sneaky crack was, so I just sealed the whole rim.

(These domes above are about 140mm tall, measured to the top of the dome; or 160mm to the tip of the green stopper. That’s about 5.5” and 6.5”.)

On the upper one, you can see where I softened the plastic with a heat gun and pushed it up so it’s kind of snub-nosed at the point where it passes over the place where the muscle (ligament? tendon?) runs down from the shoulder, to reduce the problem of it causing a sore to develop, or the flesh to be squished. (I wish I’d done that before my ‘creases’ formed!) I wear my domes often while asleep, for eight or even more hours at a stretch.

Oh, and these cheap domes sometimes have a problem with that little soft seal at the top: it’s usually because of a rough edge around the small round hole in the plastic which the reddish-pink rubber stopper presses into to seal the ‘vacuum’. Just smooth that off and they’ll work just fine.

Silicone rubber tip

Silicone rubber is really sticky and hard to work with unless you know the trick. It’s based on knowing it’s completely waterproof, and won’t stick to or absorb water. So you work it using water: specifically, ice!

Take a moderate sized ice cube with a nice flattish end to be the ‘spatula’ or trowel for pushing and smoothing the silicone rubber. Fold up a paper towel or strip of cloth to wrap around the ice cube so you can hold it without it either a) shooting from between your fingers, or b) freezing them.

Blow on the exposed end to get a film of water coating the ice (yeah, silicone rubber will stuck temporarily to ice if it’s dry!) and then just begin using it to poke and smooth and shape the silicone. If you get water on the silicone rubber, ignore it or shake it off. If you get it on the plastic, I find the silicone just seems to push the water out of the way when you move it into place.

Of course, leave the silicone rubber 24hrs to seal. And clean the plastic first so there’s no grease or dirt on it. (I use nail varnish removed on a cotton ball. That seems to roughen up the plastic so the silicone bonds really well.)

Wrapping up

So, it’s a long slow process, but cheap and effective and strangely pleasurable. Plus it has side-effects of slightly enlarging your nipples and making them more sensitive.

Just be wise and listen to what yiur body is telling you: if it hurts, back off and suction less. Despite the strong temptation to suck them harder to try to make them grow bigger faster!

Good luck if you decide to try it – and as ever, feel free to leave me a comment. I hope this article helps a few people.

I doubt that T. G. Cooper needs an introduction, having published just under sixty substantial books on Amazon to date, as well as fifteen on Fictionmania (FM), before that.

[Image from Cooper’s Amazon author’s page]The things I like about Cooper’s books are the genre (you might have guessed!), but also the quality of the writing, the relatability of the characters, the imagination of the plots, and the sheer breadth of the tales. Unlike some writers in the TG/gender-bending/transformation genres, Cooper’s works are about as far from the single-story-told-over-and-over-again as you can get. From their earlier stories on FM – which cover familiar superheroes or space ship captains undergoing unwanted gender and or mental changes, and other juicy stories – to the newer works on Amazon, we have ghost stories, aliens, fantasy, people being drawn into books, gods subverting the patriarchy, spies in tricky situations, male chauvinists getting deserved come-uppances, cops doing their jobs in even more difficult circumstances than usual, psychological thrillers… the range is too broad to encompass in a single sentence! And these are not just short stories dressed up as books, these are good length reads with rich character and lots of plot development and twists, and a variety of types of endings.

I have enormous admiration for Cooper, so I jumped at the chance to do this interview. Without further ado, here are Twelve Questions for T. G. Cooper:

1. What passions drive your writing?

I always wrote. When I was little I drew my own comics and progressed to prose in part because I couldn’t draw. So, there is something in me that always liked making up stories. I think part of it, too, came from being painfully introverted, and since I often could not talk to others I wrote stories and lost myself in these worlds I would create.

The shift to putting my work out there came because I didn’t feel like a lot of people were writing the kind of stories I liked to read, and I thought maybe there would be others out there who wanted to read the same kinds of stories I did.

2. All your books have very strong plots, but a lot (most?) are also quite erotic. What can you say about the relative importance of those aspects of your stories?

I do like plot driven stories. I think for me that’s very important because I make them up as I go along, so part of the fun for me is finding out what is going to happen as I write. I don’t outline or plan much, and sometimes I’ve started writing with nothing more than a cover. I like active stories where the characters go for things, face obstacles and struggles.

The erotic side also fascinates and motivates me. I am very interested in how my characters experience life as they change, and eroticism is a big part of life. Of course, for me, even things like having a male character try on a pair of yoga pants or a bra is erotic, so it isn’t always about the physical act of sex. I do like writing sex scenes though, and exploring what it might be like for a man or, sometimes, a woman to experience sex from the other side or while they are in-between genders.

3. You seem to put a lot of thought into every book. Do you think writing in a specific genre of erotica is very different to more traditional fiction?

I think so, although I like to think I sometimes maybe push those boundaries. I have tried lately to write some stuff that maybe wouldn’t be considered erotica, and it is different to write stories where there is no sex at all and very little talk even about bodies. Most of the YA stuff I read is very abstract when it comes to the body and physical attraction, so when writing in that genre it is a challenge and an opportunity to write more just about feelings without getting specific. I’ll see things like, “Our eyes met, and I felt myself blush.” But it’s rare even to see something to my mind as innocent as “I looked at his broad, muscular shoulders” or “I couldn’t help but admire her legs.”

4. What can you tell us about your writing process? What helps you to be so productive?

A few years ago I set myself the goal of writing at least 1,000 words a day. I try to treat it like a job. I write whether I feel inspired or not, tired, busy, sick. It doesn’t matter. Write. I am a pretty tough boss! Of course, I also enjoy writing, and once I got in the habit it became a healthy and fun thing most of the time, but the runners have a saying; the hardest part is putting your shoes on! So, I always remember when I am not feeling it that I just need to start, and then it is usually pretty good.

There is a book called The War of Art which was very helpful with this issue. I also recommend The Artist’s Way. I think it is important too to keep feeding my imagination, so that means reading and watching new stuff all the time, going to museums, seeking out new music.

5. Which parts of the writing do you personally find to be easiest, and which hardest?

The middle is easiest for me. Often times it is a little hard to get a story going, but there usually comes a time when I am about ¼ to 1/3 into a story and I will start to dream scenes, or I will see them when I am out walking, and the characters and the story pretty much write themselves. Finding an ending can be hard sometimes.

I think getting started is hard, especially as I have written a bit and I worry about repeating myself, so I am always trying to come up with new ideas.

6. What ideas in erotic stories do you find really hot? Are those the same things you write about?

I like a total role reversal, where a guy finds himself female and being dominated in very aggressive sexual play. I also find it very interesting when a guy who has not yet accepted his new gender is forced into performing his new gender while it still embarrasses him: a straight guy forced to be a stripper, or to seduce another man. In Serren’s case, to dress and live as a princess.

Even just when the guy looks and sounds like a woman but still thinks of himself as a man. One of my favourite old school stories is Team Spirit [Ed: mine too! Janice Dreamer], and one of the best scenes to me is when the guy’s voice changes in the middle of a football game and he finds himself talking in the voice of a little girl. Or when he loses all his body hair, and a woman compliments him on his smooth, soft skin.

7. When did you first start writing your stories?

As per above, always. Always. Always!

8. Who are your favourite mainstream authors?

John Green is a new love. J.R.R. Tolkien. Chuck Palahniuk. Hunter S. Thompson. Michael Moorcock. Roger Zelazny. Old school Stephen King. I went through a Milan Kundera phase at one point.

9. Who are some of your favourite erotic fiction writers?

I am bad at remembering names, so let me apologize in advance to all the great writers whose stories I have enjoyed over the years. Some that come to mind – Tom Tame. T.G Trinity. Joe Six Pack and his whole crew (though he refused my request for an interview!) Donald Allen Kirch. Selkie. (When is the next book coming out?) [Ed: Feb, I hope!]

Just about anyone on TG Comics and Stories [Ed.]. I know I am forgetting a bunch! Sorry folks!

10. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about sexuality?

It changes all the time!

11. (Tee hee.) How many of your fetishes did you discover by watching children’s television?

From my childhood I remember being very fascinated by an episode of Gilligan’s Island where the character’s were body swapped. The Professor was put into Mary Ann and the Skipper into Mrs Howell. I thought it was the most amazing thing ever. There was also an episode of a TV show called Real People where they did a whole thing on female impersonators – these were all the way with hormones, breasts and many of them looked exactly like women, which freaked me out and amazed me. I wrote a short story at the time about a criminal who tried to escape justice by becoming a female impersonator, and that was my first TG story.

Oh, and I just remembered – Get Smart had an episode where there was a male agent undercover as a go go girl at some club. Maxwell Smart wanted him to be his best man, so there’s this whole weird conversation. They used an actress and just overdubbed a male voice but the scene fired up many neurons in my brain both due to the idea of a guy having to perform as a woman and also the gender confusion of her being a best man. Agent 38 – such a small part but one that opened up my mind!

12. Please tell us something else, you wish you’d been asked about?

This one is a challenge. How about my side line hobby of making TG art for deviant art? I can’t say I love it as much as writing, but it is something I enjoy and love to post and get feedback on from people. [Ed.: here.] I especially love toying with known characters – Darth Vader, Batman, Superman. Also, I was once writing a TG story on the train, and this guy for some reason decided to look over my shoulder. I didn’t notice until he freaked out and started babbling to his friends, “What the hell? Guys with tits? This guy is sick!” I packed up my laptop and got away from the guy, but have ever since believed that I opened his eyes to a whole new world!

Thanks for the interview! This is my first one, and I am so excited!!!!

And thank you so much, Cooper, for agreeing to be interviewed. As I said earlier, you can find a treasure trove of her great books over at Amazon, or check out her blog at Gender Fluid News, which lives up to its name.

Hmm, Saturday night, well fed and slightly lubricated from a couple of glasses of Baily & Baily Queen Bee, what to do? Watch Wonder Woman in 3D, or write a long-overdue blog post…? How long overdue? Um… 😊 Oh. It’s been over a year. Er, that’s perhaps a little more than merely embarrassing.

The big news, I suppose, is the release of my first erotic book (The End of the Game), but let me work up to that….

The End of the Game

So, what’s been happening since, ah, August 2016? Well, I made a start on exploring the adult mods for Skyrim – but then got distracted. I helped Aika, MG, Phaos and others a little on numerous new releases of Trap Quest – a very not-safe-for-work heavily illustrated text adventure game. (I also helped out a little on Perverted Education… do we see a pattern forming here?) I discovered Discord when Aika set up a server for the game developers to chat, initially. But it grew almost instantly from there into a small and very quirky community with several NSFW chat channels, where I made quite a few digital friends. And discovered Leticia Latex, too – hi Leticia! – whose ‘kink’ is dollification and inflation.

Discord is a social media tool: think party-line text conversations that supports images, video, lots of emojis, voice calls and even video calls if you want, the ability to set up your own little server, or have private or invite-only group chats.

From the TQ Discord I was introduced to Second Life (SL), and found that quite enchanting, too. If you’re not aware of it, SL is a virtual 3D world which is basically a chat application, and is still very much in operation. You create an avatar – either a free one, or buy a more advanced model for ‘Linden dollars’ – and then wander about, through sub-worlds, perhaps just soaking up the scenery, perhaps chatting to passersby and locals as you see fit. And with the RLV (Restrained LoVe, gulp) relay enabled, you can allow things and people in the world to affect your avatar, up to and including some very adult roleplays. Which, I blushingly admit, I tried and enjoyed enormously.

Second Life can be all sorts of things – I discovered educational institutions there, including special interest and self-help and support groups of many, many kinds, from every corner of our very unpointy globe. SL does have a somewhat steep learning curve, so I’m sure I tested the patience of people I interacted with when I accidentally stripped off body parts instead of clothes, or wore boxes instead of the clothes contained inside, or bumped into people when trying to talk to them, or … well, let’s just say I still have a lot to learn.

Via Discord, I met Avi, and after some chatting decided to collaborate on my planned book series: Avi would illustrate them using his 3D modelling skills. You can check out more of his work at Avi0627’s DeviantArt Gallery or Avi-e-hentai. We both rolled up our sleeves and set to work.

Because it had been some years since I’d last visited my branch of the story in Milida’s Arabian Nights Gender Changing World ‘interactive fiction’ story, and my main character had gotten into quite a tangled set of problems, I started going back through my manuscript from the beginning, summarising as I went. Of course I polished and tightened what I had written, while also looking for possible tasty scenes that would be nice to see illustrated.

We found in practice that the most effective mode of collaboration was to share screens across the internet and talking while Avi worked and I gave feedback and suggestions. For both of us, the nuances of the scene are very important, and none more so than the characters’ expressions, reflecting what they’re thinking and feeling. But some back-of-the-envelope calculations made it obvious that if we created this as a single book, it would be too large: monstrously large. Which would push the price way up, just to handle Amazon’s bandwidth charges. More than that, though, I realised a single tome would be a monolith even in digital form; a pill far too large for any but a hardy one or two to swallow. Separate books made much more sense.

Anyway, Avi and I beavered away, and in due course I set a deadline for pre-release and we worked hard to meet that. Avi did his part – including a last minute change of one scene from daytime into a night scene, after I realised I had overlooked that fact when briefing Avi. Rewriting things to accommodate that would have rippled out and caused substantial work and perhaps even cause some plot changes, and Avi reworked it and added starlight and torches so quickly my jaw dropped.

The last step was to insert the images to produce the ebook and upload to Amazon. And that’s when things started going a little off the rails for me.

I was pretty confident I knew how to produce a nicely formatted and valid ebook using the excellent free software Calibre, and LibreOffice. Although I did have some qualms about LO’s handling of images – I’d recently made a just-for-fun document and found the images seemed to jump around in the text unexpectedly when I edited it.

Hoo boy.

Let me start off by saying that LibreOffice, the free and open-source office suite, is by and large amazingly good. And I’m happy to be using it for writing novels. But illustrated novels…? Well, read on.

I found it insanely hard to create a book with embedded images, mainly because LibreOffice is shockingly bad at this. If you google the topic, you’ll find people have been griping about it for years. Yes, images really do jump around in the document, leapfrogging up over earlier images that are tied to later paragraphs, sometimes mysteriously cover the text that should not be flowing under them (because wrapping is turned off), spontaneously change from anchored-to-the-paragraph to being anchored to a character, jump when you change the anchoring…. Nor can you trust the image ratios in the Properties dialogue (even if you Preserve the ratio), and sometimes changing the values here will do weird and unrelated squashing of the image, hide the caption, chop off the image, …. Fortunately, those last two errors are only in the display/refresh: if you close the file and reopen it, chances are the caption will reappear and the whole image will be displayed, not just some of the upper half.

Things got so bad that I happened to share some of my thoughts with friends on Discord as I worked, which perhaps is what saved my sanity. It also gives me a ‘running commentary’ of the final couple of hours of my day long battle as the deadline raced closer and closer. Which I present without further ado in the hopes of your sympathy.

Warning: the following transcript contains strong language.

Yes… got the caption to appear above by setting Auto Caption, and choosing Above – but that prevents you from writing a description of the illustration, it seems! Grrr….Googling….Oh my god! That worked: inserting afresh and choosing the obvious option, that I failed to notice somehow! (Position: defaults to Below; but you can choose Above)And so does editing the properties, without re-inserting, provided I also change this mysteriously-reset other parameter that should have no effect…!It’s still fighting back. Now the images shrink, and get chopped in half. But that will be a bug. Maybe closing and reopening will reveal what it really looks like…Ah ha! Kind of. Re-opening shows the image has been distorted. But if I do this… yes – perfect!Panting. Now to see if I can go back and get as good a result with the 1st image… Bites nails.Sonofabitch…Aaagh!Panting again. Okay, closing and reopening gets it back as it was. Let’s try again.Change it to Anchored to Page, first.Now: Properties: Uncheck ‘Width relative to paragraph’…Fuuck! Now width and height go bizarro!Okay, click ‘Original Size’…Now manually set Height to 820, with Keep Ratio still checked, and click OK, with fingers crossed….Erh… maybe… But the caption is invisible.Let’s reduce the height to 800…Dammit. Where’s the caption gone?:astonished:The… the whole frame containing the image, with its caption, jumped to a fresh new page, afterwards. Leaving the image on the previous page. THAT MAKES NO SENSE!Okay.Delete image.Delete frame.More panting.Okay. Re-insert image.Anchor to Page.Resize to 820 pt tall.Copy caption from old Table of Illustrations.Insert caption above…Yes!Scrolling down to image 2…F*ck!Its caption has vanished!F****CK!Hmm, why is the Properties dialogue hinting the caption is at the bottom…?Don’t trust it… Save, then close and reopen…Yes! Oh, you sneaky f*cker! Image 2 was just fine!Swallows, shaking slightly.Okay… Let’s update the Table of Illustrations and check it hasn’t become corrupted…:astonished:All the hyperlinks have vanished from the Table of Illustrations! Grr. Right, you bastard…Edit Index…Insert hyperlink Start (LS), and End (LE) around the ‘Entry’: for the twelfth time, grrr.Update Index… and the hyperlinks are restored.Right. Save.PantingOkay… Image 3…Properties… now, what was that incantation…?Anchor: not to character, you asshole! I set it to Paragraph! What keeps changing that?!Okay, and now change Position from Vertical Top to Vertical Bottom, and OK…Yes! Oh – no. Caption is now at the top, but image has been squashed, grrr!Set Width relative to Entire page, not Paragraph. Uncheck Width Relative…And image dimensions go wacko: height gets set to Width!Okay, don’t hit OK yet, let’s see if we can fix that, first…Set Height to… 820pt… OK…Hmm. Too much and… WTF?!Grinds teeth.Oh, you liar! You have not preserved the aspect ratio, you’ve stretched it sideways. Grrr. And the caption has vanished.Okay.Save, close, reopen…Yeah, right. Caption is there, where it should be. But image is fat.Grinds teeth again.:astonished:Oh, you sneaky liar. 780/565.5 = 1.3793, 841.85/595.25 = 1.4142!Oh, you complete bastard liar! You even lied about the Original aspect ratio and size! 1250/781 = 1.6005Panting.Resizing to 800×500 gets it unsquashed – looking normal – and the caption reappears.Looks up with a slightly hysterical expression.Licks lips.Now let’s see if I can repeat that!But first, let’s Save!Uh oh… there’s a page of text missing, and that image is in the wrong place. Grinds teethI bet the text has somehow slipped under it.But Wrap is off, for both, so that should not be possible.Okay.I can do this.Okay. Delete Image 3…Dammit. And image 4, too.Ah! There’s the hidden text.Sighs.Let’s try again. Get the caption for image 3 from the ToI…Okay… Image 3 reinserted; caption looks good… no text hidden… image not distorted.Save!Right: grab caption text for image 4 from Table of Illustrations. Find place to insert it…Okay! Good! Save…Update Index for Table of Illustrations… Oh! Hyperlinks all vanish again!Edit Index… Reinsert them… OK… Update Index… back again. Grr.Right. Delete Illustration 5. And its frame and caption…Wrap Off…Insert caption… Paste text… Choose Top… OK.Good! Save that.Okay… Update index… hyperlinks still there… go to image 6…. Starts giggling insanely. Oh, look, illustration 7 has moved up before it! How clever!Deletes illustration 7; and 6. And captions.Ohh! Look at all the magical blank pages!Oh! And a single character deletion removes both of them!Okay… insert image 6… Wrap Off… Insert Caption… paste text… Choose Above… hit OK…Yes!Okay, image 7 done…And 8…. All looks good. Update indexes… Save as a .docx… open calibre… Add files to selected book records… Convert to .mobi…All done!

(I spent a day reproducing the bugs and preparing data files so that I can make good reports for the LO developers in the hope that they’ll be able to find and fix the problems, with that information. It’s on my list of things to do soon. It’ll take a full day, though: I think there were over twenty different but related bugs, in the end.)

And then the fun started as I tried to get a good file to upload to Amazon. I tried loading .odt, .docx, .rtf, HTML into Calibre and converting them to .mobi or .epub; I tried uploading the raw .docx, and the raw HTML. All approaches had problems. A few were invisible errors in my LibreOffice document (e.g. I had set Include These Paragraphs in line Numbering at some stage, for a few paragraphs at the beginning, and I hadn’t noticed. Removing numbering fixed that.)

But I could find no way to have both a table of contents and a table of illustrations. Calibre apparently will only generate one. So I merged them into a single table.

The worst problem was getting the images appearing correctly. In the end, the best I could do was have each image appear twice: because the alternatives were to have some images appear like small preview images first (sometimes embedded in the body text, sometimes with part of the caption jammed up against it, squashing the image). At least this way, the reader always get to see a full size image; the downside is they sometimes see a similar-sized image first, otherwise a small image first.

Calibre reasonably faithfully shows this: when you view the converted file, if you see the image twice, it will be there twice. But in every version I created where each image appeared just once, then some or all of the images appeared with problems: sometimes only small, embedded in the text, sometimes squashed (even distorted), sometimes covering some of the caption, sometimes with the caption stuck to the left, squeezing the image to a thumbnail size alongside it. It was horrible.

I think it was a week later, after beating my head against this problem, I realised it was another image-related LibreOffice bug: when saving to anything except it’s own format, for some reason it saves two copies of each image. And Calibre prefers to import .docx files, not LibreOffice .odt files. So the workaround was to ditch LO for the .docx and read the .docx into WPS and redo the images using its facilities. In contrast to LO, it worked flawlessly, and I converted its .docx using Calibre and uploaded a new .mobi file to Amazon.

So that’s a summary of the creation of Book 1 in the Arabian Nights series, The End of the Game. (It should be available at lots of ebook retailers, not just Amazon; e.g. Smashwords) Incidentally, both the name for the series, and the name for Book 1, came from Avi, after much discussion back and forth. Here’s the blurb:

In a future heavily dependent on augmented reality, you get yourself deep in trouble in an immersive VR game.

With a universal basic income following the peaceful ‘AI revolution’, and direct neural links to immersive digital worlds, most people now choose to live and socialize via virtual reality. You are John Lemure, one of the best and most highly respected fantasy adventure gamers, with many millions of followers sharing and observing your experiences in one challenging fantasy setting after another.

You’ve had numerous hair-breadth escapes, enjoyed many astonishing sexual experiences, and acquired enormous in-game wealth and a large harem in the misogynistic male-dominated virtual world of the Arabian Nights.

This is book one of an erotic, gender-changing fantasy saga of ten to twelve books. It contains eight illustrations created specifically for the story by the talented digital artist Avi. Told in the 2nd person – “You look around and see…” – this tale grew from an idea on one small branch of Milida’s Arabian Nights Gender Changing World collaborative fiction. As such, the first three and a half chapters of this 1st book were written by Mr George, Milida, Norman33, and Charcoal, and are included with their permission. Although I’ve adjusted those chapters to suit my purposes, please be aware you’ll first be reading 4,700 words by these other talented people (after a short sample of my own writing). If you want to read an early, un-illustrated draft of this story – or any of the hundreds of other possible paths our hero could have taken – check out the writing dot com site.

Which I think is probably a fair point at which to end this blog post. Now, to watch Wonder Woman – good night, all! Hugs.

I’m juggling several projects – one of which I think of as “my erotic epic” – and so this post is simply me thinking aloud here about what I should do next. Some years back, I jumped in to Milida’s collaborative interactive fiction piece over at Writing.com, “Arabian Nights Gender Changing World,” which explores the various fates of John Lemure in an Arabian Nights virtual reality game. I had a small idea for a short story arc that pushed my buttons, and started writing chapters. Soon after I started, I had an idea for a plot that would make something more of it, and I noted down about ten short bullet points. And from there it grew.

Real life interrupted me, more than a year ago now, and I haven’t yet picked up my quill and continued the story. The last time I attempted to, I realised I had so many threads going that if I didn’t go back and re-read and summarise what had happened so far, I was going to introduce all sorts of continuity errors. So I started making a chapter-by-chapter summary to get it straight in my own head once again.

The story itself is probably way too long, and is meant just for pleasure – it’s not a deep intellectual piece, nor does it explore any notable moral ideas. It’s purely for fun. I think it will probably work, at that: being unashamedly just a “pleasure piece,” if you know what I mean (wink wink, nudge nudge). I don’t think there’s too much repetition, though poor old John (in my story arc) does keep getting into and out of variants of the same situation. A bit like the Perils of Pauline in that respect, I suppose: repetition with variation, except with changes accumulating and plots deepening, of course. So for an erotic piece, maybe the fact that it is long might even work in its favour?

“How long,” I imagine a few people asking?

Well, I think the plot is nearing completion. Writing.com limits each single interactive fiction contribution to about 10k characters (under 2k words), and I mostly pushed up against that for each piece. I’ve written about 200 parts of the story so far, and should wrap up in another 40 or so. Collected together as a single MS, it is currently just under 300k words. Which if published as a printed book would be approaching a thousand pages long – currently.

So, here’s where I start musing. The version I’ve been putting up on writing.com is basically a first draft, and I was planning to finish it off, polish and improve it, maybe add a little more, and then publish it. But a thousand pages or more? That’d be a daunting read. And I probably wouldn’t finish writing it until around the end of 2016, so it would also be a long wait. As well, very few people know of me, or the story, so if I look at it from a purely commercial viewpoint, just publishing it as a single massive piece of erotica has lots of negatives:

It would take a lo-o-ong time for anyone to read the whole thing

I’d need to charge a high-ish price because of all the effort I’ve put into it

So even with Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature, the sheer length would make it hard for people to decide to buy the whole thing

With fewer people having read it, it would garner few reviews

The all-or-nothing approach would pressure me to focus on that single story to the detriment of my other projects

I think the sheer length would discourage many readers from even starting it: there’d be little visible sign of progress as you read it.

If I break it into multiple volumes, however, all those problems go away. And it would give me more flexibility to publish some of my other shorter stories in between volumes – since I wouldn’t feel like I had to finish “my erotic epic” before working on anything else.

As for the fact that the first draft is available for free on writing.com – there are (or were) one or two hundred people following the story, some even offering feedback and encouragement, and I think it would be mean to just stop it and say “if you want to see how it ends, you’ll have to buy it.” I’d rather say “If you’d like to support my efforts, please buy the finished and polished version.”

Anyway, those are my thoughts at present. I need to get back to my summarising to refresh my memory about the complex predicament the MC had gotten himself into. While my initial ten bullet points grew into a far longer outline – so the ending is pretty well worked out – there’s enormous room for contradictions if I don’t get all the existing details straight in my head before restarting.

Well, that decision seems cut and dried, now that I’ve thought it through here.

The approach also lets me keep contributing to the erotic bimbo-transformation illustrated text adventure game Trap Quest (http://trapquest.com/), which I find both enjoyable and terribly distracting. As well as blog here, and keep any followers in the loop, along with my Twitter feed, @SelkieTG.

I had an idea for a story just now – a full-length sci-fi story that may or may not contain elements of erotica – which set me once again pondering Western culture’s attitude to sex. Because, truth be told, I’ve always been drawn towards tales of transformation; no doubt because of my own awareness of how poorly I fit into various categories. So this novel will explore an issue which I believe we will face, probably some time within the next 50 years: the consequences of a deep and full understanding of how our minds work.

That thought led me again to pondering the often transgressive nature of science fiction, and the extreme importance of that genre for humanity’s sake. SF, by exploring possible alternate worlds, lets us see the dangers and threats that face our societies and even our species, and provides us with well-thought out starting points for considering what might be. If the future is a vast dark unknown, then science fiction (and fantasy) act like torches illuminating areas near the path we tread through that immense cavern of night. A path that will hopefully one day lead us to the stars and finally allow us to place some of our species’ eggs in more than one fragile basket. So SF is important: the story of Dr Frankenstein’s monster resonates so deeply with us because ill-considered technology, or technology developed without considering how it can be used to do more good than harm in the long term, is a real and genuine threat. It’s crucial for us to devote the necessary time and money to think things through, and to talk to the people who will be affected by the changes.

Anyway, the idea for the novel is one of those important threats we’ll face from technological change and the advance of our understanding. For those of a deeply religious bent, who fear technological change and believe we should stop learning and growing – that we should never have picked the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge – I would argue that God would never have given us our wonderful brains, our inquisitive nature, nor set up the world so that something as magnificent and robust as Evolution shepherds all life through Change, if that free will were not a big part of whatever mysterious plan he has for us. In truth, I’d go further, and argue that given God’s avowed interest in free will, he must not have a Plan for us: it must be a Hope. One in which our free will and our minds will play a major part. And how would we judge parents who wanted their children not to grow and learn and develop; not to exercise the gifts they were born with and developed through hard work and passion? Provided of course that their actions are driven, at heart, from love; or at least respect?

I think one of the West’s great tragedies is the idea that all sex (or most sex) is sinful. How harmful has the enforced celibacy of priests been, how much misery and pain has that simplistic idea caused? I’ve heard of the Japanese idea of “shikata ga nai”, which I understand means “it can’t be helped;” it’s human nature, just accept it. To me, that seems a much more honest attitude. Like so many things, sex can be good or bad, beautiful or ugly; it all depends on the spirit that motivates the act.

And a big problem, and perhaps a growing problem, is that our cultures have not yet adapted to the rate of change that technology and knowledge bring to our societies. In Australia, some people argued against the free offering of vaccination against cervical cancer, arguing that it would promote promiscuity. (That “sex is sin” idea again: better to let some young girls die!) Even in the West, we haven’t invented good mechanisms to protect society as a whole from the potentially-immortal entities we’ve created: we don’t require companies and other organisations to produce a 5-yearly Ethics report, with an honest assessment of the pluses and minuses their actions have wrought. We stumble into global climate change and look about in dismay, wondering how we got here and resisting investment in engineering solutions, until the truth is towering over us like the wall of an onrushing bushfire.

We don’t have to walk off cliffs in the dark, you know. We can collectively look ahead and choose safe routes if we’re just willing to be open and honest with ourselves. We don’t have to try to stuff genies back into bottles: we can choose how we phrase our wishes, how much or how little we use those genies. Because, let’s face it, not all individuals are good, and not all organisations are good; and if we don’t understand how this newly-discovered “fire” invention works, well, some day one of those not-good organisations will figure out how they can use it to serve their own mean purposes; and then we’ll be on the back foot and at a disadvantage. We can’t pull the blankets over our heads, we have to face our fears. It’s one of history’s major lessons for us as a species, over and over and over again.

So I think that all sorts of speculative fiction, whether it be sci-fi or fantasy or whatever, is crucially important for us. And it can be fun, and moving, and even sexually exciting if we wish. Sex isn’t sin. Technology has moved on: we have birth control, we understand how to have safe sex, women are equal to men, we’re all different…. Thousand-year-old moral or ethical guide-books that tell us to not suffer witches to live, or that tell us it’s okay to own slaves, or to kill homosexuals or infidels… those maps are out of date in some areas. Update them!

Societies evolve. Things change. We adapt or we wither and possibly die. Things that once worked may stop working; things that were once essential to the smooth operation of society can start working to its detriment. Things that once meant one thing change beyond all recognition, too; so that even the people who set those mechanisms up might stare in dismay at what those practices have evolved into. Just because it used to work, or used to be good, doesn’t mean it’s beyond examination. We need to look at what we do, and why we do things, with clarity; and then honestly discuss and work out what we should be doing. Collectively.

And there’s scope for variation. Variation and difference is not just allowable, it’s essential. If history teaches us one thing, evolution certainly teaches us another: the vulnerability and fragility of too much uniformity.

So I’ll end my little rant by welcoming the technological changes that the ebook is bringing. Sure, they’re awful in some respects compared to “real” books. But in some ways real books are awful compared to ebooks. They’re similar but different things. And ebooks grant privacy of purchase – you no longer have to face our collectively-stated (and individually-ignored) lie that sex is sin: you can browse and buy what you want in private. And sure, you can’t show easily display the spines of your collection of ebooks on your shelves, to spark off conversations like “Oh, you like Janet Evanovich too, you might like…”; but you also don’t need to worry about people saying “Eh, what’s this? You’re into bondage? You’re sick!” Fifty Shades of Gray was a bestseller not just because it met a need, but because you could buy it without suffering public embarrassment..

So ebooks allow us to follow our true desires in private; and I think and hope that in time, the gap between the public lies we all solemnly pronounce and agree on, and the private truths we all practice, must surely narrow?

This isn’t a proper post, and it’s not the game review itself, either; it’s just a quick note to point you at my review (with screen grabs) of TrapQuest, the text-based, X-rated, adventure game by Aika, over on FictionMania at: TrapQuest game review. The game is one that contains several “gender-fluid” and other quite kinky fetishes.

Be warned: personally, I find TQ highly addictive. And my review, and the TQ site itself, contain images that are very NSFW.

Merry Christmas!

(PS: Aika is shooting for a Christmas Day release of a new version with a 3rd “dungeon area” to play in, which has been in development now for some time. Cross your fingers! )